New York — Two of the opening keynotes at the Artificial Intelligence Conference, hosted byO’Reilly Media, highlighted the corporate efforts by a couple of well-established technology companies to use artificial intelligence for social good.

And Microsoft Corp.’s Jennifer Marsman talked about the company’s efforts to use machine learning, the internet of things and new networking ideas to reduce world hunger.

They are part of a growing collection of tech companies investing in projects that use artificial intelligence for social good.

Microsoft Research also has staked a claim in the artificial intelligence for social good movement.

Instead, it is the connectivity — it’s getting data from the actual devices into the cloud where we can do something useful with it, said Marsman, who is part of Microsoft’s AI for Earth Group.